"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one." ~Charles Horton Cooley

Creative Writing: Poetry & Plays

The poems on this page are samples of work I wrote years ago as an undergraduate creative writing minor, but I love them still. For the most part, they express a sweet and sensual simplicity--and a direct response to nature and country life, communes, and budding sexuality. My more recent creative writing continues to explore themes of nature and embodied place--but tend to be created as performance texts.

Performance Texts:

Blue Room

Paint

Within These Walls (from Outside/In)

Compass Points (dramaturged and wrote--from Elements)

Untitled Poem (later performed in Interplay as "Blue Box")

There was a girl.
She left.
Taking with her
a small
blue
box.
In it,
was the world.

Laughing and speaking in rose water, we are melting into our Some days

Landscape

Landscape

The professor is in the field with his spade painting the hillside in
tomato, pea, cabbage, and melon. Cigarette ash falls to the ground at
his boots as he stands, planning his palette in solitary conference. Mental
rows configure and converge on the brown tilled canvas. There is contentment
in his work. He congratulates himself with another drag of blue smoke, and
cats gesture approvingly nearby.

Naked Before the Sun

Naked Before The Sun

Naked before the sun
their mammals
bounce and buoy
brushing by in the tall grass
calloused feet pondering
hot dirt clods
hips swinging intimate
with the sun and air
no longer squatting
mothering strawberry rows
the men and women lounge
full and sweaty around
the fast-running hose
rising chilled and light
to the dance of sunflowers.

Summer Song

Summer Song

Sweet in the night, soft through sticky air comes the song of the insects
the song of earthworms nuzzling the mother's chocolate skin for nutrients,
the song of the bat piercing the late white, invisible blurs trafficking
the world above the water where satisfied bass swim, stomachs full of
dragonfly and waterskeeter, whose larva waits, and waits singing a silent
song against the bloated calls of the giant bull frog, the barking dog,
the taunting jay, who are nothing on such a night.

Literary Arts Credits Include:

Director Sonoma County Book Festival (2009)

Reader WTP's Jane Chambers Contest (2009)

Reader for Sonoma County Repertory Theatre's - New Drama Works
Festival (1998-2000 approx)

Sebastopol Literary Arts Council Member Performance Team & Chapbook Committees